Baobabooks

Baobabooks' EdTech platform allows students to write, illustrate and publish their own books and supports classroom based and remote learning.

Baobabooks partners with educators and families to stimulate and support creativity and literacy skills for all children through the process of writing, illustrating and publishing their own books.

Our platform leverages teacher-friendly technology, is available is six languages (more coming) and supports classroom-based and remote learning.  Students can upload their own art to illustrate their books or choose from our indexed library of 2.4 million images.  Once published into our online bookstore, books can be purchased in digital form or print and shipped to your address, all seamlessly integrated into platform.  Come join us!

We help teachers harness technology to support their student in creating something with value and meaning.  We help student gain confidence and pride by experience the sense of accomplishment that comes from creating their own book.  We also students and schools to collaborate across cultures, oceans and continents to learn form each other and collaborate to create a book.

We are working in support of the UN SDG 4 to try and extend access to quality education to all.  Through our platform, children, teens and early adults can gain the confidence in their writing abilities while creating a book in our gamified platform and engage with other across border, continents, oceans and cultures.  They can feel the sense of confidence that comes in creating their own book.  They can use their own artwork to illustrate the book or choose from our library of 2.4 million indexed images.  And they can participate in a global community of writers and illustrators.

We partner with flies and educators to help children and student improve their writing skills and gain confidence through writing, illustrating and publishing their own books.  We host independent writing challenges and otherwise partner with schools everywhere to help their educators harness technology to achieve their classroom goals.

Our platform is available in six language, with others coming, and we could translate into which ever language is need to build engagement in Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and/or Malaysia.  To be most effective, we will employ community engagement managers in each country we serve to partner with educators and support students and help them to succeed.  We will partner with educators locally to design wiring challenges that resonate best with children at the local level.

We are focused on helping to engage children everywhere using our platform which is fun and easy to use to help them improve their writing skills and literacy while at the sometime connecting to our global community through writing, illustrating and publishing their own books.  Our platform supports differential learning, allowing us to supporting a diverse range of learning paces and styles.

Peter Nicholson, Founder & CEO

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pe...

Our platform engages students to improve their literacy and writing skills through and fun and easy to use platform through which they can write, illustrate and publish their own books.  It already available in six languages with more coming soon based on interest from other partners.  We support remote and classroom based learn and leverage teacher friendly tools to help educators achieve their goals.  Books once published ca be purchased by others and downloaded in a digital format to e reader or in physical form through on demand printing.

We have surveyed the competitive landscape, and continue to monitor it closely and while there are other tools that do some of the things we do, no one seems to have the vision, reach and breadth of feature and functions that we provide.

16,000 users, 41 schools in 5 countries give us feedback every day!

Baobabooks platform is powered by Laravel PHP Framework. Laravel provides a stable web development platform with many advantages. It helps Boababooks reduce the complexity of building and managing multiple school platforms, gives excellent scaling opportunities, can run multiple unit tests at the same time to make sure all platform changes are tested properly. Laravel comes with the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern. It is easy to use and thus offers an extremely convenient way to build large applications. With it, Baobabooks engineers can organize projects with more than five files for improved maintainability.

Model-view-controller allows Baobabooks engineers to enhance performance of the platform, it boasts transparency between the back end and front-end of development. This means that web developers have better idea of the performance and overall project in real-time so they can make necessary changes as they go. When you have to work on a large project, you have to deal with a lot of unstructured code. Using MVC can simplify your coding structure and make it easier for you to work with.

MVC support also makes it easier to find files in their logical directories when working on large projects. With it, you can control the process of how your application appears in the real world, so you can improve the app for branding purposes.

We can help student to improve their literacy and writing skills through our platform.  By writing books and then become interested in other's books and reading them, children learn without being told to learn.  We gasify the process and dry students in to each assignment or projet and work support teachers so they get the tools they need to learn and succeed.

Number of users in the platform

Number of schools in the platform

Number of countries represented in the platform

Number of books created

Number of artworks uploaded

Student progression and literacy improvement over time.

Our design and build team are all located in the Southern Philippines and we continue to hire and grow our team there.  

We can help kids improve their literacy is any one of six languages in platform and can others to support students in Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and/or Malaysia.

Students who engage on our platform can create their own books and collaborate with others across continents, oceans and cultures to publish a book together.

We need to attract seed funding to support our market expansion activities as we are in the market now.  Tis capital can also help fund our R&D programs focused on adding more functionality and features as directed by educators to help make our platform increasingly more relevant.

this capital can also hope us to attract the talent we need to support and rive wide scale adoption so that we can help more kids.

The idea for this platform arose from my frustration about how much time my kids were spending on their digital devices with little to nothing to show for it.  Since they like to read, draw and write, I had the idea to make a platform where they could write, illustrate and publish their own books.

It just grew from there.  In 2019 I contracted with Rey to build the platform. In early 2002 we launched version 1 and partnered with one school to go deep and get active feedback.  2 Teachers had 42 student get involved and they wrote 83 books,  We learned a tremendous amount based on the feedback we received.  We spent the scone half of 2020 partnering with a life long educator, Christine, to drive enhance platform functionality focused on teachers.

We hired more teachers in 2021 and as we build our engagement with the market, began mapping far more we can do to make our platform even better and are busy executing our roadmap.

After 6 months of work, we launch version 2 in late January 2021.  Educators were very intrigued but overworked doe to COVID and asked us to come back in the Fall 2021.  To date, we have 16,000 registered users, 41 schools and 5 counties with many more in the work.

19 people engaged as full time or part time consultants: CEO, CPO and 10 designers/ builders, 3 teachers, 4 sales people.  Plan to convert to employees once properly capitalised.

We are well networked within the education community and deep contacts that help us engage with the right people within schools and school groups.  The sales team has a proven track record of success.  The design team are all gamers and driven to provide us the best functionality combine with outstanding. UI/UX.

We run sprints all the time to develop. new feathers and functions.

We came up with idea to host a Summer Writing Challenge in mid-June and two weeks later, at the beginning of July, launched "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words".  2831 kids from 15 countries participated.  

Take a look: https://baobabooks.com/summer-...

The notes from parent and the students were heart warming and inspire us to do more.

Education Alliance Finland assess the pedagogical approach and UI/UX of our platform and every new feature we have to endure of highest caliber.

Privintelligent Solution provide GDPR and COPPA compliance review and revisions.

In discussions with Library for All, Save the Children UNICEF and UNESCO. 

We would like to more easily connect with schools and educators in the geographies being targeted to try and broaden our impact and scale.  Additionally, the recognition gain through being selected by SOLVE would give us further credibility and help with our fund raising activities.

Getting Bette network connections will help us to extend or reach and meet our goals as a social impact company.

We need help with PR / marketing /social and global media to raise or visibility and attract stomas, employees and funders.

Reaching more schools help us as this is our target market.